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I Found Him at Subway

I Found Him at Subway

Last updated on: September 17, 2015 at 3:10 pm by Guest Contributor

I Found Him at Subway 2015-09-17T15:10:00-07:00 Guest Contributor

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By John Bryant

subway I found him at Subway, an old man in a brown jacket, boots, jogging pants, standing in the small space between the table and deli counter.

He shut his eyes so he could hide himself under them, in a place where the cold and his age couldn’t find him. Eyes closed tight so he wouldn’t fall out of his eyes and land in the Subway, in his body, like a fish flopping in a bucket. There was no one else there. I stood in the silence he’d made in the room.

His face relaxed as he fell all the way into himself, the only place inside him that was bigger and quieter than the restaurant and his entire life. It was his peace.

He stood under a jet of warm air when the Subway heater came on. He lifted his face toward the ceiling as the warm air pulled the damp out of his coat and asked him gently to return to who he was when he was eighty and dirty and in a Subway. His lips searched the heat until they became a smile. He opened his eyes and found me looking at him.

“Are you hungry?”

“No,” he said.

I would not ask again. He sat down at a table close to the door and looked at the years of dirt that had gotten into his hands.

The employees were on smoke break, music off. I used the quiet to study him. He accepted the milky film over his eyes, the crust in his nose, the dirt on his forehead, like he’d not touched or wiped his face in years, would prefer the world gather on it. I wouldn’t have spoken to him if he hadn’t stilled the place.

The quiet seemed to frame him, to adore him a little. Quiet has its own benevolence like that. It held his chin up, the blue of his eyes. To hold him up, bend the light toward him so he was almost phosphorous.

Quiet like that suspends who and what things are, establishes another reality here on earth, and then leaves, taking that reality with it.

He was precious in the quiet though he is not when I look back. He is hard and intimidating and his smell pushes you away. Memory cannot shape him into the precious form he took in the quiet. I could only love him when it was that quiet.

The quiet in the Subway was the oldest thing I’ve been in. It could dream what I’ve never seen, and let me know the old man could be touched on the shoulder, the knowledge not in my head or heart but a thing I wore lightly, that rested just on my skin, a hand that tapped him gently on the shoulder.

“May I sit down with you?”

Maybe quiet asks us into relationships we don’t understand. As a rule, I don’t bother homeless people more than once.

He looked at me with a warmth I haven’t found in him since.

“Sure, old friend.”

He didn’t want food or money, didn’t need anything I could understand. When I sat down my shoulders relaxed and my mouth closed and I felt every year of my life loosen from me. So I fell, heavy as grace, into the seat and out of belief and desire and what I should and should not do.

Sammy is in a nursing home now. I was briefly the man who sat down with him, stayed with him, got him to a hospital. We found out he suffers from dementia. It is not the version I live with. I live with this: though I was briefly, inexplicably, the one who saved him, I will always be the one who is not going to save him.

Through coincidence, grace, Sammy is now in a nursing home, where he eats chocolate and flirts with nurses. He is not very nice. I go visit him in the nursing home with a body that shakes when I see him, that fears he is out there dead somewhere. How can I say this, understand this, that my visiting him is a penance, a chance to go back and do the right thing, when I must have done it right the first time?

He does not talk to me when I am there, but he doesn’t mind me, either. Sometimes he stares at me. If we have a relationship it is a relationship we do not understand. The nurses leave him be, point to where I can find him. I often travel an hour and a half only for him to fall asleep when I get there, when I’m starting to explain how good it is to see him.

There is an aura about him, sometimes, a trance he falls into long enough to hide from his age and dementia and find a freedom larger than both of us and he looks at me with the gleam of it that says we both know something we don’t have to say very loud. I don’t know what it is. But it is not quiet either.

I have sat down, next to his bed, and prayed with my eyes open. Seen him drawn into himself, wrinkled and still dirty, and still felt I have not understood him. He still disgusts me a little, intimidates me. I don’t know that I like him very much.

But I almost feel that quiet that begins when I pray, and though it doesn’t clarify him, or adore him, it adores little things he brings, inexplicably, to mind—like seeds of new worlds. The nurse’s hand on him, a glass of Coke.

I climb back in my truck after the visit, feel the illuminations dim, the world fall back from me to its place, feel time gather into the slow way I move, into my thoughts.

John Bryant lives with his newlywed wife in Beaver Falls, PA and is studying to be an Anglican priest.

The above image is used under a Creative Commons license and is credited to Bobby P. on Flickr.

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